Hi all, The cTAKES Project Management Committee has voted that it is time to officially begin the release process for cTAKES 5.0
It has been almost 6 years since version 4.0.0 was released, and with a worldwide user count estimated in the thousands, a new release will be extremely valuable. Releasing cTAKES 5.0 will involve some work, and the project needs volunteers to assist in the process. The most important thing right now is the appointment of a Release Manager (RM). While the position is not to be taken lightly and does involve work, it can be a great experience (and a resume builder). We need a cTAKES committer to be the RM, but I am going to split the general responsibilities below. I am doing this because I believe that any user familiar with cTAKES can be a co-RM. Requiring a committer: 1. Creating Release Candidates of the code. 2. Deploying and Signing the actual Official Release. Not requiring a committer: 1. Coordinating people performing documentation, testing and bug fixing. 2. Communicating progress with the developer list. I am sure that I am forgetting something, but those are the 4 tasks that I can think of right now. If you would like to be the Release Manager (or a co-RM), please volunteer on the dev@ctakes.apache.org mailing list. Other tasks that must be performed for a release include: 1. Testing the release candidates. 3. Contributing documentation. 2. Writing fixes for bugs that can be fixed for the release. 4. Updating the release information on ctakes.apache.org Anybody can test release candidates. There are countless pipelines that can be built and tested, but I think that we should try to cover the 'most commonly used' pipelines. If you run any pipeline, please report success - even if you don't run it specifically for release testing. Documentation can be contributed by any user. A cTAKES committer is required to actually push the documentation to the wiki, readme, release notes, etc. Sending out markdown, images, plain text or just recommendations is open to all users. While only committers can actually push changes to cTAKES code, any user can contribute fixes by creating code patches or even just copy-pasting code in an email. Updating the ctakes.apache.org website will require a committer, but non-committer assistance is possible just like it is for bug fixes. One person (Tim Miller) has already volunteered to perform testing and another (Dennis Johns) is currently working on the GitHub wiki. I don't think that people need to officially volunteer to perform last 4 listed tasks, but it may be beneficial to identify areas that you would like to cover in order to prevent duplicated work. I suspect that I am forgetting at least some minor items, but they will come to light when encountered. I urge you all to take part in the release process. You can earn good karma, become famous as a cTAKES power user, and perhaps be nominated as a Committer! Thank you all, Sean
